Tasmania: seeing the wood but not the trees

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The world's tallest known hardwood tree, a eucalyptus regnans, stands at 92 metres in the Styx Valley.Picture:Roger Lovell

Tasmania sells itself
as "the natural state".
But there is a gap
between rhetoric
and reality as logging
of old-growth forests
continues - to
international dismay.
By Melissa Fyfe and
Andrew Darby.

Larraine Herrick has a soft
spot for Tasmania. She
and husband Malcolm
have toured the state and
even wanted to move
there. They like the cold.
They think the island is
beautiful. But it was the logging
trucks that stuck in their holiday
memories. And the Herricks are
familiar with them; they come
from Tumbarumba, part of the
Snowy Mountains’ timber industry.
But they had never seen so
many: rattling through historic
towns, down the main streets of
Hobart and along the scenic tourist
routes.

"And they have these big logs,
and you just know they are coming
from old-growth forests," Herrick
says. "I don’t think I could take living
there and seeing them every
day — knowing (the trees) are
going mostly to woodchips."

Foreigners, too, have noticed
them. Joan Masterman operates
the Freycinet Experience Walk, a
trek through the magnificent national
park on Tasmania’s east
coast. Travelling to the park from
Hobart, her customers often pass
up to 12 trucks.

A French guest recently told
one of Masterman’s guides: "In
Tasmania, you have your forests
on wheels."

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Tasmania sells itself to the
world as "The Natural State"—but
its slogan jars with its continuing
clearance of virgin forests, not to
mention the poisoning of animals
that often accompanies the process.
Tourism and logging — one
bringing in record numbers of visitors,
the other with near-record
levels of woodchipping — are
increasingly at odds with each
other.

It is a controversy that is attracting
international attention.

A string of savage Australian
media reports on forestry practices
has been joined by similar
critiques in France’s Le Figaro,
Britain’s Independent and Germany’s
<>iSuddeutsche Zeitung.

The BBC, the Los Angeles Times
and a German television station
have all recently visited the forest
in the Styx Valley. The Styx is a
heartland of the controversy. It is a
fairytale forest; author Bob Ellis
has described it as "the dark,
seductive habitat of childhood’s
bedtime stories and old men’s
waking dreams, where Tolkien’s
elfin creatures scuttered and Merlin
slept".

Hand grenades
thrown from the
trenches are not
producing solutions.
MICHAEL ROBERTS, Tourism Council of
Tasmania

But the Styx has been, and will
continue to be, logged by the timber
industry — in a state in which
questions have been repeatedly
raised about whether cronyism,
corruption and deception underlie
the management of forests.

Tasmania’s tourism industry is
bucking an international downturn
in tourism. Almost overnight,
Australia’s most forgotten state got
on the map; British travel agents
named it as one of the world’s four
hotspots for 2004. Visitor numbers
rocketed by 20 per cent last year
and, for the first time, tourists
spent more than a billion dollars.

"Gandalf's Staff" in Tasmania's Styx Valley.Picture:Dean Sewell

Many credit this success to the
energy of former premier Jim
Bacon who, before he recently
stepped down due to lifethreatening
cancer, took tourism
as his own portfolio and drove
Tasmania’s image makeover. His
government invested $400 million
in tourist infrastructure, including
a new passenger ship service for
Sydney and an extra Spirit of Tasmania
for Melbourne.

With this came a carefully
crafted image, built on the state’s
natural assets, pristine wilderness
and the sense of escaping busy city
life. The state’s main tourism website
spruiks its clean air, pure
water, dramatic coastlines, rugged
mountains and tall forests.

But then came a string of
embarrassments.

In 2002, conservationists paid
$20,000 for an advertisement in
the heart of Sydney’s airport that
depicted the Styx Valley juxtaposed
with a burnt, clearfelled forest.

It said ‘‘Discover Tasmania
before 2003’’. It infuriated the Tasmanian
Government and tourism
bodies, and Qantas removed the
billboard.

Last year, Tasmania’s biennial
arts festival Ten Days on the
Island, pitched to the mainland as
arts-based tourism, was boycotted
over old-growth logging. Novelists
Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Richard
Flanagan and Joan London
scratched themselves from the
$40,000 Tasmanian Pacific Region
literary prize in protest.

Soon after, any chance that
Australia’s most massive tree
might become a tourist destination
went up in flames. Only discovered
in 2002, El Grande was a
eucalyptus regnans with a
19-metre circumference. Last
autumn, it was killed when a
regeneration burn went wrong.

Its demise helped fuel a midwinter
protest that drew more than
2000 people to the Styx Valley.
There, The Wilderness Society and
Greenpeace began a tree-sit, 65
metres up a threatened giant eucalypt
called Gandalf ’s Staff . The
protest is still going, four months
later.

Celebrities, too, are fuelling the
furore. Comedian and former
radio hostWendy Harmer was perplexed
by the log trucks when she
took her children for a 10-day Tasmanian
tour. So she stopped and
counted themtravelling into Launceston.
There was one every four
minutes. "And this is supposed to
be the Holiday Isle?" she asked in a
letter to a newspaper. "It was more
like driving around a giant industrial
estate. It was enough to make
you cry."

In a recent Four Corners program
on ABC television, reporter
Ticky Fullerton said the issue was
about "the fate of a national asset,
now in the hands of an industry
that is self-regulated, self-serving
and unaccountable".

The program aired allegations
that a local council had been pressured
by the State Government to
fall into line with the timber industry;
that there were close links
between the major timber company
Gunns and the State Government;
that returns to Tasmanians
for their forests were low; and that
woodchipping was intensifying.

Finding the truth about the forests
from Forestry Tasmania is
notoriously difficult under the
state’s Freedom of Information
legislation. But Bill Manning, a former
forests practices inspector,
last year blew the whistle in evidence
to a Senate committee.

Manning became the first
insider to allege broadscale illegal
destruction of public forest and
claimed forest management had
deteriorated appallingly. He cited
more than 80 examples of alleged
breaches of fauna protection provisions
— "meant to protect the
unique creatures of Tasmania’s
forests: the giant freshwater crayfish,
wedgetailed eagles, the
spotted-tail quoll" — and said no
action was taken, despite his complaints.

Instead, he said, the industry
was allowed to regulate itself ,
starving the Government of information
in a culture of "bullying,
cronyism, secrecy and lies". The
then acting premier, Paul Lennon,
rejected the Manning claims as "a
farrago of false and inaccurate allegations".

But other commentators have
pointed to close connections in
Tasmania’s small political and
business networks. Lennon last
year travelled to Scandinavia to
inspect pulp mills with John Gay,
executive chairman of the nation’s
largest woodchip company, Gunns
Limited. The Government has
since begun a revamp of environmental
rules for these mills.

On the board of Gunns is the
former Liberal premier Robin Gray,
whose loss of power followed the
failure of his attempt to establish
the Wesley Vale pulp mill in 1989.

For its part, the industry likes to
point out the numbers: 40 per cent
of the state protected forever in
national parks and wilderness
areas; 86 per cent of its old-growth
forests never to be touched. Of
these big old trees, those over 85
metres tall will be protected.

Labor’s Mark Latham will
walk among these forest
giants next week, in a visit
the Greens are hoping will
break the deadlock over
Tasmania’s forests. He will
spend equal time with the
timber industry and workers
before deciding on a stance.

The industry and the environmentalists
want to know whether
he will back his state Labor colleagues
or whether, like Bob
Hawke with the Franklin River in
1983, he will win green votes by
championing the state’s forests
and pledging an end to old-growth
logging.

Does any of this influence travellers?
Tourism Tasmania, a State
Governmentmarketing body, does
not think so. Its Tasmania Visitors
Survey, an exit poll covering
10,000 people each year, finds
consistently that only 5 per cent
make a comment about forestry
practices.

In a smaller sample, the Tourism
Council of Tasmania found
that only 2 per cent of tourists
mentioned logging.

"People are still voting with
their feet," says Robert Hogan, the
body’s director of communications.

Many of the big operators
based in tourism centres such as
Strahan, Cradle Mountain and
Coles Bay, have no public quarrel
with state policies.

Some, however, are afraid to
speak out. One large operator told
The Age that they were staying
quiet because an official made an
explicit threat to exclude the operator
from Government approvals.

But the small operators — the
boutique outfits that give Tasmanian
tourism its folksy friendliness
— may have no alternative.
Increasingly, boutique outfits are
being driven to take on logging to
protect their turf.

They also find it difficult to
explain forest practices to visitors:
the logging trucks, the use of 1080
poison (animals such as wallabies,
which eat growing plantations, are
killed with laced carrots) and the
"strange vistas of single-species
plantations", as Tasmanian author
Richard Flanagan described them.

Tourism-versus-forestry spot
fires have flared around the state.

Eagle Hill fringes the Savage
River rainforests, Australia’s
largest, where couple Richard
Summers and Maree Jenkins want
to build the Tarkine Wilderness
Lodge. They fought to stop
clearfelling of a hill in their viewscape.
After resorting to a public
protest, they lost the logging area,
or coupe, but saved the view in
negotiations over the treeline. "We
weren’t protesters, it wasn’t what
we wanted to do," Jenkins says.
"But it got us back into negotiation
. . .We don’t agree with clearfelling
but forestry and tourism definitely
have to work together," she says.

A formal mechanism trying to
do just that has been agreed
between the two industries. The
six-month-old Tourism and Forestry
Protocol was hammered out
by the industry-based Tourism
Council of Tasmania and three
forest industry organisations. It
recognises things have to change,
according to TCT executive director
Michael Roberts.

"Hand grenades thrown from
the trenches are not producing solutions,"
he says.

The protocol acknowledges that
logging is at odds with the state’s
wilderness destination marketing.

"This is now starting to be an
issue influencing perception and
the response to Tasmania’s promotion
of its ‘wilderness’ product,"
it says.

It also warns that the use of
1080 poison to kill wildlife browsing
on young plantations is
increasingly unacceptable to visitors
and that drivers can have
"uncomfortable experiences" with
log trucks on narrow roads.

The protocol is under test at
Leven Canyon in the island’s
north. More than 60 tourism
groups are now locked in talks
with Forestry Tasmania about a
coupe on nearby Black Bluff. The
groups argue the coupe would be
visible from the canyon’s main
look-out; an offence to the eye
they believe akin to logging in view
of a Blue Mountains lookout.

Environment groups are reaching
into tourist interests elsewhere
in the state. A main highway to the
west coast runs through Hellyer
Gorge, where a myrtle rainforest
canopy shades the road. But on
each side of the gorge, recent logging
ran to the highway edge, leaving
visible clearfells. As it
campaigns to protect this kind of
rainforest, Tarkine National
Coalition spokesman Phil Pullinger
says the gorge is being
removed from main touring route
maps, so it has produced its own.

In the Huon Valley of the
island’s south, environmentalists
issued a self-drive tour pamphlet
that points to roads where log
trucks run, out of sight of tourists,
and where clearfelled forests lie.
Timber workers who had had
enough of this kind of grassroots
campaigning took matters into
their own hands last month. About
60 blockaded the opening of an
eco-tourismretreat in the Huon by
Senator Bob Brown. The blockade’s
spokesman, log truck driver
Harry Price, says of the retreat’s
owners: "We don’t stop them
going about their business. The
point is, don’t them stop us."

When it comes to tourist operators,
Forestry Tasmania is in fact
one of the largest. In 75 separate
visitor centres, picnic grounds and
attractions, the state timber agency
opens up part of the 11 per cent of
forests that are reserved in a total
1.4 million hectares of public forests
under its control.

Now it is moving into big tourist
projects such as the Tahune Airwalk,
a steel walkway strung high
in forest above the Huon river,
70 minutes’ drive south of Hobart.
More than 300,000 have walked
above the forest canopy and the
attraction is credited with leading
a local economic revival.

It is also a chance for the controversial
agency to spread its own
message. Forestry Tasmania uses
photographs of local people on
welcoming signs posted on the
road in. Other signs point to forests
logged years earlier that now stand
regenerated. But there are no comparative
signs pointing to
unlogged roadside forests. Nor do
they direct tourists to the breathtaking
sight of recent clearfells
down side roads.

Can forestry and tourism coexist?
In terms of economic worth,
the two industries are neck and
neck, both claiming turnovers of
about $1.3 billion. However, in an
economy that has been sluggish
for some time, the argument in
favour of Tasmania’s timber
industry is often about jobs. But
employment growth is coming
from the tourism sector, not logging.
Once the dominant local
employer in many small Tasmanian
towns, forestry now yields
fewer than half the jobs provided
by tourism. The real figure is
argued. The Forest Industries
Association of Tasmania says a
total of about 10,000 people are
directly employed but the group
Timber Workers for Forests cites
Australian Bureau of Statistics figures
pointing to 6800 people, with
perhaps 1000 more in allied work.

Tourism now employs 22,500
people directly, with 4000 jobs
created last year alone. New ventures
are popping up everywhere.
In the Tarkine, for example, a new
bushwalk and tour business called
Tiger Trails sprung up 14 months
ago and has already earned
$100,000 and employs 14 people.

Former Tourism Tasmania
board member and winemaker
Andrew Pirie says there is a deepseated
view in the state that real
jobs come from heavy industry
such as forestry, what he calls Tasmania’s
"smoke stack" future
option. But he has faith in the
future of what he calls the "attractive
industries". In the end, he says,
it is about the development side of
Government talking to the tourism
side of Government and agreeing
how to "manage the show".